Exactly! In my day job, a lot of our customers are small to medium governments, and their primary decision points are around risk exposure. We've managed to set up our government to optimize for avoiding possible downsides instead of innovating and making the status quo better.
Defaulting to caution and conservatism in local government doesn't sound entirely bad. It's too easy to bring the power and authority of government down with unintended consequences on disadvantaged people. Think abuse of eminent domain or similar.
However, I don't think this argument applies to cars, which are not people.
>It's too easy to bring the power and authority of government down with unintended consequences on disadvantaged people. Think abuse of eminent domain or similar.
True, but for the past century so much power has been centralized at the state and federal level I think the abuse potential at the local level is very low. The "actually affect change" potential of your average citizen is highest at the local level. If experimentation and competition is going to happen I think the local level is best.
Of course from time to time you get dumb crap like Sac country's working on your car ban but the number of people effected is kept minimal while everyone else gets to point and laugh and learn what not to do. It's a much bigger pain when that kind of stuff happens at the state or federal level.
